Emails and Faxes.

Folded:

• Brinner (breakfast at dinner. Think the All Day Breakfast at Little Chef)
• Red Dead Redemption (check out the trailer here. This will be bigger than GTA IV)
• Ne-Yo (best dressed singer in R’n’B. What? That’s worth something)
• Fat Ben on The Apprentice (busting out of those pinstriped suits like a middle-aged banker. Rock on)
• Eurovision 2009 (no Terry Wogan on the sauce, Andrew Lloyd Webber doing the song, fit girl singing it, and we still lose. This is a screw up to be proud of)

Creased:

• Brunch (neither one thing nor the other. Just get up earlier)
• UFC 2009 Undisputed (looks more like fornication than fighting)
• N-Dubz (like Vanilla Ice never went away. Most embarrassing pop group ever)
• Slimmer Ben on The Apprentice: You’re Fired (lost the weight, gained about a ton of make-up)
• Captcha verification codes (women are easier to read)

Alan Sugar, now affectionately known as Suralan – or, alternatively, a grimacing Wooly Willy toy with a haunted look in its eye stuck crudely onto a child’s wrinkled body in a mortician’s suit – sits in the high chair grumbling at moronic, vapid shills.

It almost sounds like the perfect job doesn’t it? Imagine being paid by the BBC to sit at a desk and break idiot’s hearts for the entertainment of the braying public. It’s one of the easiest jobs in the world.

However, the catch is, he has to continually meet these dunderheads without pulling out a carpet stapler and filling their faces full of excruciating tiny wounds.

For a moment on last night’s The Apprentice, it looked like Britain was going to view the most horrifying episode of any show ever aired. The show, from the off pretty much said “tonight is all about babies”. A grim vision passed in my mind – Sir Sugartits demanding that the challenge would be for the would-be richdicks to create a baby before the day was out.

The thought of Ben yelling “SHOUT SANDHURST! SHOUT SANDHURST, SLUT!” at McQuillan in the futile attempt to roughly and brutally make his arse pregnant, or dish-faced Noel Fielding lookalike Debra riding atop a weeping Howard, punching him in the face with huge cement-mixer hands, grunting like deaf pigs in throes of an ejaculation that can only be likened to the death rattle of a cockroach, spilling eggs from its guts.

Of course, that wasn’t the deal at all. Rather, the assembled vampires were being asked to shag the public in the quids. Weirdly, these sharked-eyed poindexters were dealing with products for children. A bunch of people with less life-skills than a lepton looking at a bunch of stuff and trying to decide what The Nation’s Parents would want to buy for their puking little offspring.

The natural thing to choose was a foam hat, especially designed to make your child look like it had Down’s Syndrome. As an aside, you don’t see *those* helmets these days do you? Unless you tune in to The Apprentice of course. One of the clunges on the show basically implied that they’d sell the dubious products via ‘guilt’. Presumably they hadn’t considered the secondary guilt of their child getting mercilessly bullied at playschool, which is ironic for a bunch of people who probably spent their time getting spat at in school corridors.

Our James needed to impart his unique take on the world too. Watching him squat and talk to women about their ‘lid’ being flipped open so the baby can ‘pop out’ was worth the entrance fee alone. As he mimicked the pressing of a pubic bone and a monkey stump to some clearly puzzled preggos, internet searches for Entire Skeleton Removal spiked.

Anyway, one team of morons beat another gaggle of goons and that treated us to the familiar spectacle of The End Of Programme Showdown. This of course, is television that could curdle milk. It captures that awkward bullshit that we all go through in every excruciating job-interview we’ve ever had. In effect, each person is asked to talk about their strengths. The appalling feeling of pre-sick water rising through the throat while you try to convince a twat in a suit that you’re a reliable so-and-so and good at taking one for the team.

However, this job-interview is dragged out over weeks while everyone laughs at you and hates you. Even Alan Sugar hates you. You talk and talk about how wonderful you are, hoping that no-one chips in… but the whole world offers abuse like it’s some gift. No. You keep that. You shallow, irritating git. It’s all yours. The reward is either further humiliation on national TV or you get a tiny, withered hand pointed your way – like a dried-out monkey paw on a stick – and that timeless line: “You’re fired.”

Sandhurt Snow Patrol Ben got the chop, which saw him near-blubbing on telly like a mardy-arse. Off in a black taxi he’s taken to a life of also-runnery. Regardless of what he acheives in life, there’ll be someone, somewhere, ready to lay into him and snort uproariously about the time he showed everyone what a prick he was on our idiot lanterns. The long trudge to the cab compounds the bleakest fears. The niggle becomes a load klaxon. “You’re not good enough. You’re not good enough.”

And how we all laugh. Laugh like the mean-spirited shitehawks that we are. We watch, we sneer, we predict a winner, we go to bed. We don’t care. These people are just moving meat factories, shunted on screen and shunted back off again. They’re as human to us as Nookie Bear. Possibly less so. And that’s what TV is. A writhing pie full of shit and sinew. Yet somehow, we gobble it up every night.

So who is the real fool?

This was a guest blog by Mof Gimmers out of that Electric Roulette. Go visit now!

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

Folded for the good stuff, Creased for the bad.

Folded:

• Land of the Lost trailer online (and, surprisingly, it looks okay)
• Being only as tall as a Ribena Berry yet still being able to kick everyone’s ass (we’re talking about you, Mr. Jack Bauer)
• The Thing…coming back to your screens on September 15th (a giant widescreen head on legs? We’re there)
• Dr. Oetker pizzas (extra fat, extra taste)
• Dizzee Rascal (don’t let the fact that Dizzee looks like a sixth-former playing truant fool you, he’s alright)

Creased:

• Four minute Terminator Salvation clip online (enough already)
• This year’s The Apprentice contestants.. (..are the worst ever, right? Ben isn’t fit for £100 a year, let alone £100,000)
• Friday night KFC (seriously don’t even get tempted. It’s worse than you could possibly remember)
• Sunny and cold (an increasingly common weather phenomenon for the U.K. For putting you in a good mood, it’s right up there with warm and drizzly)
• Ben Sherman shirts (haven’t been worn correctly for twenty-five years now)

What is the one thing The Apprentice has taught us? That’s right, that emotion has no place in the business environment.

And that’s probably why Joan Rivers won Celebrity Apprentice last night – thanks to all the plastic surgery she’s had, the only emotion she can ever properly display is a kind of constant resigned shock. But let’s stick to the point here – Joan Rivers won Celebrity Apprentice last night.

So congratulations, Joan Rivers – you’re now officially as good as Piers Morgan. Please celebrate this fact in the appropriate way, by which we mean either sobbing relentlessly or haplessly attempting suicide.

We get the feeling that this season of the British Apprentice has already peaked – especially now that the self-satisfied bellend with the voice like The Futureheads has been fired – but even if it hadn’t peaked, it would still have some way to go to top the heady heights of last night’s live three-hour Celebrity Apprentice finale in America.

Yes, you read that right. Three hours. Three full hours of watching Donald Trump’s contorted pink face bellow and puff in a series of ever-more disturbing ways beneath that ridiculous orange pube-bale that he tries to pass off as a haircut.

And live, too, so anything could happen, so long as by ‘anything’ you mean ‘developing deep-vein thrombosis in your arse while praying that the sleeping pills you desperately shovelled into your face at the midway point hurry up and kick in’.

Anyway, the eventual winner of Celebrity Apprentice was Joan Rivers. If anything, winning Celebrity Apprentice was Joan River’s reward for utilising her impressively diverse arsenal of business tactics throughout the show, from hardline straight-talking to fiery diva fits to intimidating would-be customers with her terrifying shiny frightmask of a face. BuddyTV reports on the Celebrity Apprentice finale, which saw Joan Rivers pitted against poker player Annie Duke:

The finale challenge–which had the remaining two contenders raise money by selling Cirque du Soleil tickets and providing a pre-show VIP party–saw Annie way ahead in earnings than Joan. While Annie also won props for integrating her charity well with the challenge, Joan took home points for attracting bigger celebrities and integrating another sponsor, Kodak, into the fore better.

So whether Joan Rivers deserved to win Celebrity Apprentice is still up for contention, but you still have to hand it to her for the tenacity she showed by beating all those other people we’ve never heard of. Her success is proof that 75-year-old women can still succeed in this world, but only so long as they’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on having a number of age-defying surgical procedures on their faces to a varying degree of success and are especially bitter about everything.

But what did Joan Rivers win? This was Celebrity Apprentice, remember, so the prize wasn’t going to be a job with Donald Trump. Instead, Joan Rivers won some money for a charity and, if there’s any justice in the world, a bout of Trump-sex so overwhelmingly nightmarish that your eyes would fall out if you even gave it any serious thought.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

15 bell-ends, one job. The race is on to find someone to tongue Alan Sugar’s wrinkled old scrotum. And make lots of money before the economy collapses.

Before this series of The Apprentice started, I took a look through the candidates, allowing them to hang themselves with their own demented words. Now we’re halfway through – seven firings (can you name them all?) and one who gave up before they’d even started – let’s see who’s left.

Ben Clarke

With Phil gone, Ben has little competition in claiming the award for biggest twat of the series. A walking stockbroker cliché, he even wears braces and a pin-stripe suit, like the dick uniform that it is. Braces! It’s 2009, gawddarnit. Thankfully doesn’t wear a bowler hat, mostly because his head is stuck so far up his arse that he’d need a Caesarean just to take it off.

Distances himself from any sort of decision, just in case it’s the wrong one, sort of nodding along annoyingly so that he can claim as much credit as he likes.

Bottled bringing Debra back to the boardroom because he was scared of her. Aggravates everyone too much to last.

Bell-end rating: 10
Chances of winning: 2

Debra Barr

Another hateful person, Debra represents everything that’s irritating about the making-money-for-the-sake-of-it bunch of self-important arsewipes. Particularly grating when she bawls at and argues with someone sat three inches away from her in the car. A student of the “louder = righter” school.

Had a hissy strop at Nick Hewer for some reason, immediately endearing herself to Alan, who told her to stop as though he was protecting his wife’s honour. She’s a terrifying prospect to deal with, and could start a fight with a mirror.

Bell-end rating: 9
Chances of winning: 5

Howard Ebison

Duck-faced Howard spends most episodes watching and staring in the background, like a creepy children’s toy from a low budget 80s horror film. Sort of Nick Hewer Junior.

Doesn’t seem to actually do anything, which is probably going to work in his favour, because it means he’s been getting on with it intelligently and efficiently. Actually doing the tasks properly makes for exciting TV.

The longer he stays under the gay-dar (because some tit on You’re Fired accidentally outed him) the better.

Bell-end rating: 3
Chances of winning: 9

James McQuillan

Another one that generally fades into the background and gets on with it – bold prediction: James / Howard final.

Despite apparently being a bouncer at some point, James – who looks a bit like Bernard Breslaw – seems ready to burst into tears at a moment’s notice. His reaction to almost being brought back into the boardroom by Ben was to stare at him as though Ben had taken a hammer to his favourite puppy. He was crushed, the dopey sod.

Bell-end rating: 4
Chances of winning: 7

Kate Walsh

Token fit one, came with two surprises. (Not those, you perv. They’re tiny, anyway.) Firstly, that her mouth moves towards whoever she’s talking to, crawling up the side of her face like it’s trying to find out what the inside of her ear looks like.

Secondly, she’s actually pretty good at the tasks, and has a reasonable chance of winning.

Unfortunately, like a drunk uncle at an Australian wedding, or an idiot on Jeremy Kyle, she can’t help but draw herself into every single argument.

Bell-end rating: 6
Chances of winning: 7

Lorraine Tighe

Lorraine is brilliant, simply because she doesn’t really get understand what’s going on. By her own admission, she sort of bumbles through the day and eventually clocks on to what she was supposed to be doing. She’ll walk to the shops without really remembering why, and get there realising that it’s because she’s lost all her shoes.

Exactly the sort of behaviour that the others really love.

At her best when she’s giving a presentation or talking to Real People, because she’s absolutely useless at it, and tries to buy time after being asked an awkward question (such as “how much does it cost?”) by replying “that’s an excellent question, and one I’d be happy to answer…” before stumbling over her words and admitting “we’re not sure”.

Bell-end rating: 7
Chances of winning: 3

Mona Lewis

Mona doesn’t really do a lot, and is sort of the human equivalent of wallpaper. 70s-style wallpaper that your nan has. Doesn’t really look like anyone amusing either, other than the “centipedes in my vagina?” woman (Google it.) Not exactly a comedy goldmine is Mona, the cow.

Now that I’ve said that, next week she’ll single-handedly earn £1m of sales in a day, while rescuing Margaret from a burning building and explaining quantum physics in a way that Alan understands.

Bell-end rating: 2
Chances of winning: 4

Yasmina Siadatan

If only Yasmina were good looking, the papers could nickname her “The spotty hottie”, but she’s not, but that probably won’t stop them. Has serious dominatrix like qualities, and manages to only bicker a little bit, the kind of stern-ness

Her highlight so far is that while she runs a restaurant, she had no problem serving up Asda Smartprice tuna to paying guests in one task. The Asda Smartprice brand is like Tesco Value, but with the nice bits taken out. It’s on sale for the benefit of people who shop in Asda anyway and are too scummy to pay for normal food.

Getting noticeably more pregnant each week, which will inevitably lead to an employment law skirting conversation with Alan, in which he convinces her that she doesn’t want to work for him while she’s got Evil Chef Jr. swimming around inside her.

Bell-end rating: 5
Chances of winning: 5

Who wrote this? Why Nik Johnson from Shouting At Cows did.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

9 – Some pictures we want framed on our wall forever – BestWeekEver

8 - Seven musicians who need a hug – Radioexile

7 – Things that inexplicably exist, vol 376 – Chicagotribune

6 - Sex fetishes that are fine for work - Cracked

5 - Why swearing is officially brilliant – MSNBC

4 – The rightful punishment for anyone who has ever hired a white limo - I Am Bored

3 – Is it just us, or is everyone on this year’s Apprentice actually quite ugly? – PopSugar

2 – Just a load of weird pictures for you to copy and email your unfunny workmates  – Manofest

1 – How to make airflight even more completely unbearable…

To get noticed purely for being a no-talent twit with all the affability of a particularly itchy and prominently positioned boil, that is.

We at the mighty hecklerspray wouldn’t know about this from first-hand experience, of course, as we are friendly, approachable, talented and popular. As well as influential. But we learn how difficult it must be for these not-even-Z-listers that pop up every now and then when yet another publicity grabbing event occurs.

This time it’s the turn of Omarosa. Wait – who?

Ah – a ‘reality star’. Code, in this post-9/11 world for ‘utter nobody that for some reason still pollutes the airwaves with their pointless presence’. Or: ‘the American version of Jade Goody‘. Pointless, pointless people that drift through existence on a diet fit for a king, known by passers-by and actually liked by some members of the public. Solely because they once did one thing on some TV show or another.

Yes, this is the camp that Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth falls firmly into. And she’s helped her ‘I have nothing worthwhile to contribute to society’ quota no end with an appearance on The Wendy Williams Show on Monday, where she proceeded to have an argument with the host and generally be something of an attention-seeking waste of space.

Apparently irritated by the introduction she recieved to the show, Omarosa proceeded to rant, snatch back her book she was there to promote (probably called ‘How To Lose Friends, Alienate People, And Register Even Lower On The Celebrity Scale Than Toby Young’) and mock host Wendy Williams’ looks.

Well, it’s certainly an interesting take on the whole chat show guest thing, kind of bringing in a new level of idiocy to proceedings. Why bother politely accepting the fact that you’ve been deemed worthy of appearing on national television and are allowed a few minutes of time, to yourself, to hock whatever it is you want to sell to the plebs this week when you can be a complete knob about things and make the public that already dislike you hate you even more?

But hey, at least Wendy Williams managed to respond in a professional and thoroughly correct manner to the whole debacle, telling the Associated Press that she believed Omarosa to be:

“A delusional, D-list, pathetic woman.”

Now that’s a quote well and truly worthy of the giganto quote marks. Fancy a job at hecklerspray, Wendy?

Check it out for yourselves, folks:

Folded:

• Take the personality test! (are you extraverted, introverted, insane? Find out here! Takes a while to do though – oh, and at least one of us turned up with the same Jung personality as Abraham Lincoln)

• Barry Norman Pickled Onions (yep, that’s right, the Barry Norman. They taste quite nice)

• The Long Walk To Finchley (regardless of your opinions on Margaret Thatcher, this one-off comedy/drama plays as the epitome of what BBC4 do best: light political fluff)

• Lee McQueen (seems like, for once, any old Alan has picked the right candidate; apparently he’s putting Lee to work on the London Underground somewhere)

• Hulk squish (not smash. Norton’s fine though)

Creased:

• CGI (why is it seldom as good as filmmakers think it is?)

• When those factory bods accidentally put smooth Tropicana in the juicy bits Tropicana carton (doesn’t ruin your day, but certainly gets the morning off to a rough start)

• No more The Apprentice (in 2005 it started off worse than Dragons Den and then swiftly became the only reality show worth watching. Big Brother then, everyone? Hmm? No)

• Gone Baby Gone (far and away not a bad movie, but Mr Ben Affleck needs to find his own voice and not Clint Eastwood’s if he wants to succeed as a credible director)

• Jumper on DVD (even with some mildy interesting deleted scenes, you’d still be better off eating your money rather than spending it on this)

And, as is normal for The Apprentice, the full line-up of candidates angling for a £100,00 job being Sir Alan Sugar's monkey-slave have been revealed. But what are this year's gang of Apprentice contestants actually like?

Well, one is a global pricing leader, one is an international car sales strategist, one is… oh, let's cut to the chase – all the Apprentice contestants will be hateful, ambitious, money-fixated, ladder-climbing arseholes who don't have the skills to match their endless tiresome self-promotion; the sort of people who you'd punch to death in a second if they came up to you and started trying to network. That probably covers them all. 

The Apprentice starts next week, and it finds itself in something of a rut. Although the last season of The Apprentice got some pretty incredible ratings, there's no escaping that a lot of it was pretty dull. Sell coffee, sell sweets, sell art, sell sausages – most of the show was just the exact same task over and over again, which hardly seems like a good way of testing people's versatility.

So that's something that The Apprentice had better start changing if it doesn't want to become a self-parody. A bigger problem, though, is the quality of candidates it needs to find. All the really good candidates applied in the first three years and now all that's left are rejects from previous selection processes and newcomers who just want to be on TV.

It's a fine balance that The Apprentice needs to walk – too far one way and you've got a dull show full of dull people, too far the other way and you've introduced so many new rules and punishments that you've got The Apprentice LA, which is probably the last thing that anyone at the BBC wants.

This season of The Apprentice needs memorable contestants like never before – they need people as unlikeable as Ruth Badger, as angry as Tre Azam and as borderline personality disorder-suffering as Katie Hopkins. Plus some of them totally need to be doing it.

So with that in mind, let's have a look at this year's gang of 16 Apprentice hopefuls – 15 of which will be fired with the remaining one being paid £100,000 a year to throw heaps of unsold Amstrad email phones into a flooded quarry or something:

Nicholas De Lacy Brown, 24 – twat.

Jennifer Celerier, 36 – brassy twat.

Jennifer Maguire, 27 – horsey twat.

Raef Bjayal, 27 – gigantic twat wanker.

Claire Young, 29 – hateful twat.

Lucinda Ledgerwood, 31 – Lucinda? Twat.

Kevin Shaw, 24 – friends with Jenson Button twat.

Simon Smith, 35 – recovering drug addict twat.

Helene Speight - gender-confused twat.

Sara Dhada, 25 – arsehole.

Michael Sophocles, 24 – bell-end.

Ian Stringer, 26 – fame-hungry bastard.

Shazia Wahab, 35 – turdhole.

Lee McQueen, 30 – moron.

Lindi Mngaza, 22 – dyslexic twat.

Alex Wotherspoon, 24 – accident-prone tit.

Those are their official Apprentice descriptions, too. We know, we thought they were a bit harsh as well.

Read more:

Meet This Year's Boardroom – Metro